TORONTO ¨C Most of us don't see ideas as living,
breathing organisms. Most of us are not David Lynch.
Mr. Lynch's ideas are many things ¨C surreal,
inspired, earnestly dark. But they're definitely not passive. They come
scurrying out of the subconscious, like those inexplicable miniature
people who slip under the door at the end of his new film, Mulholland
Drive, or the lady who comes out of the radiator in his first feature,
Eraserhead . They seem to have arrived directly from a dream;
indeed, few directors so deftly capture the look and logic of the dream
state.
Mr. Lynch pledges allegiance to his ideas, his
visions. He gives them shape and sets them loose onto the screen. They
make sense to him, and it's your job to sort them out.
"I accept and stay true to the ideas," the
director says at the Toronto International Film Festival. "There are
trillions of ideas, and sometimes you get ideas that you fall in love
with. They tell you everything. They tell you how they want to be, and you
just stay true to that and keep checking back."
In Mulholland, which opens Friday, the
ideas tell us about two women: one starry-eyed blonde (Naomi Watts), one
mysterious brunette (Laura Elena Harring). They take us on an
amateur-sleuth mission through the underbelly of Hollywood, but their task
is minimal compared with ours. Identity and time are but toys to Mr.
Lynch, pliable, mysterious and never to be taken for granted. He may have
clues to share, but that doesn't mean he will. "I never really say
anything about plot," he says coyly, "but you can run some theories by
me."
He puffs on a cigarette and speaks in a
Midwestern nasal tone. He's friendly, if a bit guarded. He could be your
Uncle Bob from Des Moines (on a bad hair day). Except your Uncle Bob
probably has more comforting dreams.
Some filmmakers connect too many dots for you
and take the mystery out of a story. Some let the mystery linger on the
edges before setting it loose to finish the puzzle. But Mr. Lynch starts
with the mystery and lets it get deeper, which also usually means darker.
It's no surprise that he counts Bergman and Fellini among his favorite
filmmakers: They were two of the most intuitive directors we've known,
eager to release those irrational, nightmarish corners of the imagination
that take us where they may.
"I like 8 1/2," he says, referring to
Fellini's free-associative classic about a filmmaker's creative block. "I
can't pretend to understand the whole thing, but I can get lost in the
moods and the feelings and ideas and have the mind engaged and just go
with it. There's plenty to hang your hat on, but there's a lot of room to
dream. Those films that offer room to dream are the ones I
love."
In that case, he must be in love with
Mulholland Drive. In a dream-or-reality season that also features
Waking Life and Vanilla Sky, Mr. Lynch's latest takes
particular delight in disorientation. It's as crooked as The Straight
Story was straight (though still a good deal more coherent than the
likes of Eraserhead and Lost Highway). The basics come
together after a while, but even they require you to stay a step ahead of
what's onscreen.
Much of the enticing confusion is simply par
for Mr. Lynch's twisted, winding course: He's always been willing to chase
those scurrying ideas. But there's another factor in play here, one that
lies in the differences between film and television.
Mr. Lynch has enjoyed success in both mediums;
his Twin Peaks, which ran from 1990 to 1991, may be the most
creative series to ever hit the networks. He actually conceived
Mulholland as a television pilot for ABC, but the network folks
didn't care to sign on.
Mr. Lynch puts it a bit more
bluntly.
"ABC did me the favor of saying they hated it
and goodbye," he explains. "But that tricked my mind into catching ideas
that I wouldn't have caught ordinarily ¨C solutions to a pretty big problem
that gave me a bunch of anxiety for a while because I didn't have those
ideas. Then, one night, in come the ideas. I was thrilled. I saw the way
to do it, and it was as if it had always wanted to be that
way."
Oh, when the ideas ... come marching in
...
You can see some of the seams in
Mulholland, those places where the planned television series with
room to grow became a feature film with a definite stopping point. Then
again, you could watch Lost Highway a few times and wonder whether
another episode might help explain what the devil happened. Mr. Lynch
doesn't have to fancy himself an artist; he already is one, with all of
the enigmatic imagination that the label entails.
He was born in Missoula, Mont., the kind of
small town that rolls over and exposes its dark side in many of his films,
and was something of a misfit as a high school student in Virginia. Back
then, he saw his future in painting. Then, one day in art school, his
still life became a bit less still.
"One day, I was working on a 6-foot-square
painting," he recalls. "Most of the painting was black, but there was kind
of a garden there. Then I heard a wind, and I saw some parts of the
painting appear to move. I thought, 'Man, that would be beautiful to have
movement and sound.' "
And a surrealist director was born.
You could ask if the story were true, but that
almost seems beside the point. Perception is always up in the air of Mr.
Lynch's world. Reality and fantasy, dreams and experiences jostle for
space among the midgets, naifs, and scoundrels. But in the end, they all
step aside when the ideas build up a good head of steam.
From The
Dallas Morning News
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